The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

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As Hartley finds himself in the midst of war-torn Somalia, Serbia and Rwanda, his writing becomes darker and eventually he cannot distance himself from the horror.

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Hieronymous Bosch reincarnated as a frontline correspondent invited to the midnight banquet of Africa’s bloody horrors, that’s who Aidan Hartley seems to be, an outrageously brave and anguished heart disgorging the never-inert legacies of colonialism.”—Bob Shacochis, author of The Immaculate Invasion Ma Hartley esagera, non ha ritmo, è caotico, a ogni cosa dedica al massimo un rigo e mezzo, affastella nomi date luoghi eventi fatti, esagera col succo e col colore, l'esotico, il pittoresco. As a boy I asked my mother why our great-grandpas and our great-grannies from families of Yorkshire farmers and Scottish doctors felt the need to leave home and travel all over the world. The author was a foreign correspondent in the early 1990's in Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, the Balkans, and probably other countries that I can't recall. Hartley turned 30 in 1995. He was born in Kenya and raised in England and returned to Africa after Oxford, which makes his life fascinating just with those facts alone. Callaghan & Newbury (recommended carrier) 07903 299810/07794 751445. Deliveries to the Home Counties and has a storage facility.

In the Nineteenth Century, Europeans were attracted to the wealth of the tiny island. It was such an obvious trading entrepot and was one of the few places in Africa that had plenty of cash. It was also helpful that the island climate was more accommodating to Europeans and there were less nasty diseases to afflict them than in most of the rest of the continent. It was a natural hub of civilisations, even if much of the wealth was a by-product of slavery. At all times, Hartley writes with a raw honesty about not just the horrors he witnesses, but his feelings and reactions to those events. Often, he has Schindleresque moments of 'I could have done more to help'. Other times, he shares his dad's feelings that the British should never have gone into Africa in the first place, yet having colonised, should never have then left. This constant honesty and self-reflection is refreshing.

Hartley uses crisp, to-the-point prose threaded with delicious, dark humor and a sense of the absurd that reaches its height as he details the bungled U.N. intervention in Somalia. His accounts of bloodshed and corruption are all the more effective for his refusal to sugarcoat it. . . . In the end, one can only stand as witness, and Hartley is an eloquent one.”—Claudia La Rocco, Associated Press I found this book to be absolutely riveting. Hartley has actually related two tales here, one detailing his quest to shed some light on the circumstances surrounding the death of his father's friend Peter Davey; the other tale relates Hartley's own story from his education abroad to his misadventures as a foreign/war correspondent for the Reuters news agency. Our women certainly led hard lives. At Mabel’s wedding, her seventeen-year-old sister Ethel was one of the bridesmaids. Ethel caught the eye of the best man, another army officer named Beames. Beames was a friend of Rudyard Kipling, who based The Story of the Gadsbys, his 1899 Indian “tale without a plot,” on their courtship. They married and immigrated to Canada, where they became pioneers. Beames turned to drink, abandoning Ethel to raise three children in a remote log cabin. One of her sons grew up to become a sculptor and moved to the United States, where one of his commissions was a monument to the American Indian wars that stands in Washington. My grandfather Colonel Reginald Sanders proposed to my grandmother Eileen after meeting her on home leave at a piano recital before returning to duty in India. By the time her ship arrived in Bombay she had forgotten what he looked like. They met up somehow and married within hours. He took her into the hills to his new married-officer’s quarters, carried her across the threshold, and proudly asked her what she thought of it. She burst into tears. The Zanzibar Chest] is thrillingly charged with an undercurrent of passion.”—Suzy Hansen, Salon.com